„Die Hand einer Farbigen“. Theodor Storms Von Jenseit des Meeres im literatur- und diskurs- geschichtlichen Kontext

Rohner, Melanie (2020). „Die Hand einer Farbigen“. Theodor Storms Von Jenseit des Meeres im literatur- und diskurs- geschichtlichen Kontext. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik ZiG, 11(1), pp. 11-24. Transcript 10.14361/zig-2020-110103

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In Theodor Storm’s novella "Von Jenseit des Meeres" (From Beyond the Seas, 1865), the main female character Jenni is the daughter of a German plantation owner and his West Indian lover, who is a 'mixed race' woman. As the North German first-person narrator has loved Jenni since childhood, and wants to marry her in the narrative present, the novella revolves around the question of the implications of her maternal inheritance. The only external residue of this is the bluish-dark crescents at the roots of Jenni’s fingernails. This detail becomes central to the production of meaning in the text, for the way in which the crescents become the subject of the novella is symptomatic of how Storm tries to reconcile racial thinking and liberal humanism. This comparative study embeds the motif of the dark fingernails in its context, drawing on the history of literature and knowledge to clarify the ambivalences that underpin the novella.

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